Education has been a key process in the maintenance and development of every civilized society. Recently, the development of methods and technology for remote education has become increasingly important. Distance learning using communication by mail has been one method of education which is of particular interest to those who are employed and do not have time for a full-time education at a college. Broadcasting educational material by radio or television at a predetermined time is another remote educational method. Yet another remote education method uses video media. It is also known to have a video conferencing system, in which a teacher and a student view each other via a video link. In one system, educational material is distributed through a general network. In this network, a dedicated videophone system and a whiteboard system, which can share data via computers, are linked via a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN).
The above-described conventional remote education methods generally cause users to be restricted by time, location, media type, and/or communication. It can be difficult to increase the number of users and prepare a variety of flexible educational contents.
With the increasing use of the Internet, remote learning systems have been developed which enable people to access educational courses from anywhere in the world, at any time, by using, e.g., a browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer™, Opera™, FireFox™, or other similar software systems. An educational establishment hosts a site with one or more educational courses, and users who are registered may log on to the site and access the appropriate course. This type of system is often referred to as “e-Learning”. In the last few years, computer systems that enable the delivery, management, and administration of enterprise-wide learning, known as Learning Management Systems (LMS) have become increasingly popular. Learning Management Systems are suites of tools that deliver the proper course or content to the students, at the proper time, in the proper format. An LMS typically provides registration capabilities for all types of learning events, student home pages, automated course catalogues, classroom resource management, skills management, records and content keeping, and delivery of e-Learning courses. Marc J. Rosenberg describes a detailed definition in prior art of the core capabilities of an LMS, in E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age, McGraw-Hill Books, 2001 pp 162. First, by this definition, the LMS may have a common online course catalogue, a common online registration system and an up-front competency assessment tool. The LMS may have the ability to launch and track e-Learning and perform e-Learning assessments and perform management of learning materials. After integrating knowledge management resources, the LMS may perform customized reporting, support collaboration and knowledge communities, and integrate the information into the respective system, e.g., a human resources system used in the management of an organization.
In one learning system, the educational content is provided by a content developer and integrated into an LMS. For example, the information may be supplied by the content provider on one or more CD's or other media, and copied into the LMS system. A student interfaces with the LMS and the content is provided to the student by the LMS. This imposes limitations. The computing and network demands on the system will limit the number of users and the number of courses that can be accessed. There will also be problems if the content varies frequently, and this will be a particular problem if this type of system is used not only for education but also for accessing financial data or constantly changing databases of information.
The communication between content files from content developers and an LMS is increasingly governed by what is known as the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). SCORM is essentially a specification or standard to allow LMS programmers and content developers to produce interoperable learning systems without significant collaboration. A content developer whose content files are SCORM conformant can be reasonably confident that the content files will perform as desired with a SCORM conformant LMS.
However, conventional systems require that the LMS and the SCORM conformant educational content be stored on the same Web domain, on the same server, and/or behind the same firewall. In other words, a user accessing a learning management engine at a given Web domain (i.e., within the same root Web address) could only utilize SCORM content that was also stored at the same Web domain (i.e., within the same root Web address). If a content developer were to improve or update the SCORM conformant content to be delivered to the learner, the SCORM conformant content package would have to be delivered to multiple servers to be saved or loaded into the same Web domains as the various learning management engines with which the prior content was associated. For example, a content developer that provided SCORM conformant content packages to two or more universities would have to distribute copies of the updated content package to each of the two or more universities and ensure that the new content package is stored in the proper location.
Other learning systems have a central LMS and external content from a variety of external sources. However, in such systems, the central LMS is a specific, proprietary LMS with its own application programmer's interface (API), business logic, and protocol adapters. This imposes tremendous expense and limitations because institutions who have already purchased an LMS, would be required to then purchase another LMS and migrate their student data to the new LMS. Such migration would cause unnecessary and burdensome cost and risks compromising data during the migration.
There is a need, as identified by the inventor, to enable one or more of any, separate, existing, and SCORM conformant LMS system or systems to connect to a central content repository.